Desire, Suffering, Non-Attachment 17.11.015

I cannot be with you.
To be with you, truly with you,
I must be you;
then I will not need you.
And I will not be with you.

14.11.015

It's the 9 o'clock hour of the morning. "I Thought I Was an Alien" by Soko is playing, and I'm standing in the beams of sunlight streaming in through the kitchen window. I am about to make oatmeal for breakfast.

I have been thinking, as of late, about the transmutation of thought and intention (now: "People Always Look Better in the Sun" is playing) into the realm of the physical. I have been thinking about ghosts, so to speak, and the Japanese/Shinto concept of what can only be described in English as a "soul": a sort of life-force which can be held by inanimate objects, and which is created ("We Might Be Dead By Tomorrow," now-- Cyan, I wish we were talking) by the interaction between a human and an inanimate object.

I have been thinking, specifically, about the concept of "home"-- in the abstract-- and the ties between that abstract concept and physical spaces. More specifically, I have been thinking about sweeping the floor ("No More Home," now, sings Soko), and how such acts of cleaning, mindful maintenance of one's domicile, can create a real-world, physical, almost-tangible and definite feeling of "home."

(I have now sunk to the floor, which is littered with the dirt and detritus of living, as well as the salt crystals which I spilled the other day from a broken bag of magnesium salts-- lavender-scented-- which I purchased for the bath.  I have sunk to the floor to continue writing, and, perhaps, to examine the floor as I make my next statement:)

The thought has crossed my mind that certain acts of domesticity-- cleaning, cooking, washing dishes, painting walls and hanging art, arranging furniture and houseplants, sewing and hanging curtains-- especially when performed mindfully, or when the experience is performed in tandem, by multiple individuals (friends, family members) at once, or in concert-- these acts must be what imbue an otherwise-meaningless physical space, physical objects, with the "soul" which gives them real-world meaning. These acts-- which so many people view as a waste of time, and so either rush through them, hire "lessers" to do them, or else ignore them all entirely-- are what make a real "home."

I have been trying to find my home for a long time now.  Despite what I think I understand of Buddhism-- non-attachment, lovingkindness, and an active and mindful engagement with the present-- I have been placing my thoughts, hopes and energies into a very tenuous and unreal "future," wherein I believed my home lay.

Soko is still playing (how are you? how are you? she choruses), the sunlight is still streaming in.  Time to make oatmeal.  Then I really need to sweep this floor.

I see death in your face.

04.9.013 Fantasy Lover

There is no prince. None of flesh, blood, or bone.
He lives in the home between my ears-- unreachable

I need a fantasy lover. Those ones are better.
The real ones are never birds of my feather;
I'd fare better with a fantasy lover--

a pretend one, who doesn't exist,
one in my head-- but with me so deluded,
it wouldn't matter.

I could rage and rock
and mutter on into the night,
ricocheting between madness and and sadness,
inane sanity and insanity (cleanly).

I need a good fantasy (clearly).

5.08.015

What to do about the desire for skin-on-skin contact, a need for the fresh gloss of an oxytocin dose?

When a certain kind of love-- absent the pregnant punctuation of kisses drawn out too long,

Passion confused with a yearning to feel human-- loses its quintessence:

How to untwine one from its other? How to ask of a lover that he love

Not in a way which makes sense-- rather, in the manner to which thine own self has become

(so selfishly) accustomed?

27.05.015

I keep my memories in strands of hair,

and when I need to forget I go to the shears;

when I want to start over, I force baldness.

Supplications into uneasy air:

memories taken on violent breeze,

momentary eddies, then dissemination:

Severed strands scatter (dismembered, forgotten)
becoming fire's fodder or the whippoorwill's wattle
in a home of hair and mud-as-daub.

I carry my tension in clenchéd teeth,
my worries in welts bitten into my cheek--
with the hum of the hive comes molars missing.

08.12.016

18.2.015 17th and Western (a mess of a work in progress)

Beneath the cracking concrete flats,
The Earth is (still) there.
In the low hum of winter:
Grass, upspringing (still) from ruptured capillaries, spidery little things
Tracing pathways and outlining
Something dead, and lifeless
Chalk-white, really
Bone-like, even
A monochromatic overpaving
Of wild and unruly life.
Wellspring whence we all came.
And to which we are wont to return
Denying, (still) denying
That we, too, are our-selves the natural world
(Still) unending and changing;
All overpavings illusory, milk-white
And just as useless
Harmful, even
Detrimental, it is said
To a system which has no use for the lactose therein.
Useless.
Yet
(still)
:
That promise.
We like to be lied to, we have a need
For concrete promises breaking, and yet
Don't understand;
Why.
Pave over the grass.
I (still) do not understand.

In the low hum of winter:
The Earth is still there

Beneath the salted concrete flats.

Bone-white, really.





Under the summer sun:
Radiant heat (useless)
Might burn through my feet
Soles a conductor, (longing to walk upon the bare earth)
Heat rising quickly through the bones in my leg, white-hot pain in my sacrum
(I fear I might vomit)
The heat rising from the spidered concrete flat
Burning the air from my lungs,
Cracking my throat
(Chalk-white, a promise)
Blistering the skin from my hands, my head
Capillaries rupturing in my nose
(Cool blood dribbling down)

29.3.015 RE: Michael Oaktree

And I sit here, asking myself--

What must it be like, to come from money?

Who might I be

if not for my struggles, my grief?

What might I have become if becoming wasn't do-or-die,

if everything I had was handed to me

or just as easily within my reach?

Where lies the line bifurcating pride

(for my work, my deeds, my livelihood hard-won)

and a cynical judgment 

of those who had no say in the matter

regarding the spoon with which they were fetally fed,

born-and-bred?

Why must I feel resentment?

I cannot fault a soul. 

I do not want what they have. 

They are humans, as I am. 

So why the disconnect?

07.4.015 Auxiliary; Insularity

Every deletion,

each small, cold-controlled

backwards push:

a minute death, 

a sinking further inwards.

I have done it again;

I could wear these partings

as accomplishments--

a frozen star, each

an adornment upon

a void of cold Hell, each

event a singularity, a lifeless jewel.

The ache hasn't come unburied yet. 

Always there-- slumbering or awake, self-aware--

I know it is about to start. 

I know where it will leave me--

I have known where I was going all along. 

31.3.015

It is Now that I pontificate upon the totality of Forever--

its clutches settling slowly into the corded nape of my neck, seeping
into the synapses therein,
to rest there like listeria:
a slow paralysis.

Drugged and dosed:
some wayward child facing
a child-hood feverdream
(serial surgeries, scalpels removing
and giving new order;
sterile barbs and firepokers,
[so cold and unkind, themselves]
prodding without relent:
carefully reshaping, though they do not care)
with the perennial ticking
of the ole ticker's bloodflow:
reminding without relent.

The weight of passing days, undifferentiated,
sinks
ever-further
in;
with a digitalis-sweetness,
lacing the nape of the neck

(toxins):

a glaze of pyritic myelin
(sticky acid in wax's stead)
permitting the dissemination of the electricity therein,
the ions' communications tissue-dissipated
(a shame).

What once may have been
a message of storms, a din
of forked lightning
racing to the brain:
it comes unbundled as heat
in the nape of the neck;
from heat, to dread at the base of the skull;
and from dread to dead-silence,
no-feeling,
stillness.

It is Now that I ponder the reality of Forever--
with the absence of bygone moments
boring into the nape of my neck,
and a lulling hum-- the buzz of thoughts
without escape-- to fill the space

above the base of my skull.

Go West (work in progress)

Seventy-five, stoned,
on the Sunday-night highway.
Bright Eyes and Quasi-sentimental taillights, trailing...

Go west, go west.
You have seen and lain upon
the shores of the East:

warmed internally by their sands' radiant heat
(and yet chilled, still,
by the alienating memoryscape

of waves overfrozen, making for a moon-landing
of an afternoon stroll
[craggy and barren are these imagined hills:

floes, which-- through no
internal will of their own--
may soon

calve and fall away, crumbling into the unforgiving
waves, though ever do they remain
alien, and still]),

and warmed as well by the burgeoning swells
and spumes of effervescent joy:
roiling, carumbling, brought

about by the countless encounters--
moments of singular love, supreme--
themselves, so like the

unaccountable grains of sand
adorning the shore of
one of the Greats.

Go west. Go west.

Regain what was lost,
push farther, go
past that very-middle, that

cumbersome ballast
(deadweight of non-committal, treasonous
wafflings: middle-ground,

middle-of-the-road,
mismanaged feelings-- onto the back burner,
hastily pushed) which ties the heart

to an early, watery rest.
Push past, go further,
go West.

Find again that hard-won solitude,
"sun-age" as the Spaniards
and their descendants might profess;

again, find that loneliness.

Onward, to (perhaps)
wander the high desert, to
find that heart-center

(newness with each pump, each
depletion of blood),
to find again your breath...

God, perhaps, or nature more likely.
The self, mayhaps.
Truth, definitely.

That hard-won solitude.
Communion with everything.
Keep going.

Go West.
Go West.

For your love was lain low in the East.